Let
us first shower British journalists with faint praise. On most matters, they
tower over their American colleagues like a mammoth dwarfs a baby elephant.
It’s just too bad that both sets of scribblers seem to have the memory of
newborn lizards.

As I watched Lord
Butler do his little snow job, I couldn’t help but admire his talent. What a
brilliant performance! Ship that man to Los Angeles to run circles around
the likes of Johnny Cochran. If the gloves actually fit, Butler would still
acquit. In the press conference that followed his report on British
“intelligence failures,” he was a one-man stampede stomping on every
question fielded by the Fleet Street wizards.

Lord Butler basically
sold the premise that Blair was taken in by reasonable intelligence that
turned out to be wrong. The Prime Minister didn’t lie – he was just clueless
about the truth.

MI6 was also found to
be innocent of charges that they had doctored and sexed up intelligence. The
universally admired English spooks had apparently reached the same erroneous
conclusions as other foreign intelligence agencies. As it turns out, those
damn foreigners across the pond were recycling the same batch of fibs that
MI6 had gullibly imbibed from Iraqi exiles.

There was just one big
hole in Butler’s doughnut. Blair could not possibly have been ignorant of
the
Office of Special Plans (OSP) and their well-orchestrated campaign to
subvert intelligence on the fabled WMDs. Why didn’t the British press follow
the OSP thread? Where are all those sassy British pundits when the world
actually needs them? Maybe they’re still hanging out at the BBC trying to
figure out if Israelis occupy Palestinian land or vice versa.

Jim Lobe knows all
about the OSP. As far back as August of 2003 he wrote that “An ad hoc
office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears
to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly
neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency
channels to lead the push for war against Iraq. Retired intelligence
officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two
offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing
it along to the White House.”

If Butler had wanted
to know more about the OSP, he could have easily contacted Jim Lobe or
retired Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski or followed
this link:

To believe Butler’s
tale of “intelligence failures,” one has to digest the unlikely notion that
Tony and MI6 agents had no idea about the neo-conservatives who cooked up
intelligence and stove piped it to the White House. Naturally enough, the
American account of how the CIA made the same exact mistakes also avoids any
mention of the OSP. If one reads these reports carefully enough, they might
notice that certain parts specifically criticize the CIA, while others refer
to the more generic “intelligence community,” a convenient dodge to prevent
a separate probe of the rogue OSP intelligence operation that Wolfowitz and
Feith set up in the Pentagon.

If Tony Blair is not
himself a neo-conservative, how likely is it that he didn’t know about these
Likudnik operatives, their agenda and their role in deliberately corrupting
intelligence to market the Iraq war. The Prime Minister now wants to wear
the coat of arms of Tony the Liberator. But before he struts around as a
noble knight intent on saving Iraq from the vile Saddam Hussein, he should
at least come clean on a few questions.

Did the Prime Minister
know that Douglas Feith and Wolfie the Liberator were ardent Zionists who
have the same level of interest in liberating Iraq as they have in promoting
Palestinian freedom? Was Blair unaware of this cabal’s long-term association
with the Netenyahu wing of the Likud party or their role in sabotaging the
Oslo Peace process?

If Tony was daft
enough to be taken in by the neocon intelligence racket that led to war, why
did he fail to make a fuss when the same Likudnik social engineers were
chosen by Bush to misrule post-war Iraq? Did he think the Iraqis wouldn’t
notice that Sharon’s boys had landed in Baghdad?

Was MI6 really taken
in by the OSP fib factory? Is it possible that Blair didn’t know that
graduates of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) staffed the OSP? Were
British spooks unaware that the AEI, a front for the Israeli Lobby, had
successfully hijacked the Pentagon and the State Department? Did MI6 agents
have a few spare quid to buy pre-war morning papers or is the British
intelligence budget that tight? How likely is it that MI6 didn’t have the
resumes of Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lewis
Libby and Elliot Abrams?

Who really believes
that Tony Blair, the enforcer of genocidal sanctions, is suddenly the caring
sort of chap who gives a rat’s ass about the welfare of Iraqis or Arabs? Has
he ever leaned on the Toxic Texan to confront Ariel “Qibya” Sharon, the
serial arsonist and career war criminal?

The only real question
still up in the air concerns Blair’s motivation to go on with this charade?
Perhaps he does it to cover up the lie he told yesterday or pave the way for
the lie he will tell tomorrow? I think Tony is just a compulsive gambler and
a man playing for very high stakes. What we have here is a middle class
Englishman who wants to make the big time in Hollywood and New York. A few
book deals with certain publishers will do wonders for his retirement years.
In such ventures, his neo-con connections will certainly be of some help.
Blair will do what Clinton did - leave office in humble circumstances and
make a fortune on the American lecture circuit. You can bet the house that
Chirac won’t be invited to tag along. Who doubts that Lord Blair, the newly
minted British Millionaire, will need the services of a Butler to manage his
estate?

Killing Arabs and
ripping them off, with the assistance of the Likudniks and the Shaky Sheiks
of Araby, is an old British ritual. Behold the Palestinian inheritance from
the imperial estate of Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour. But Tony Blair
will still distinguish himself as the first British Prime Minister to
slaughter Arabs for the sake of stuffing a few extra quid in his pocket.
May he choke on every last penny-farthing.